1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system and in particular to a data processing system and method for recognizing and correcting dyslexia-related spelling errors. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a data processing system and method for recognizing words input by a user that may be both dyslexia-related misspelled variants of a word or another correctly spelled word.
2. Description of Related Art
Dyslexia is a congenital and developmental condition that causes a disturbance in the use of language. Most often, dyslexia causes diminished abilities in reading, writing, and spelling. Persons with dyslexia tend to make similar characteristic writing errors.
Typical word processing applications have tools for correcting common spelling and grammatical errors. For example, spell-checking utilities in word processing applications use a reference dictionary having correctly spelled word entries with which a word entered into the word processing application is compared. If a match between the entered word and an entry of the reference dictionary is not made, one or more entries with character strings close to the word entered by the user may be suggested to the user as a substitute for the entered word.
Various types of dyslexia, such as dyseidesia and dysphonesia, exist. Characteristic spelling errors result from the particular dyslexia type. For example, phonetic-like spelling errors are characteristic of a word misspelling provided by a person having dyseidesia, and misspellings having letter positions reversed in a word are characteristic of a person having dysphonesia.
Spell-checking utilities in typical word processing applications recognize misspelled variants of a word based on, for example, the word length and the constituent letters of the misspelled word. Due to the various types of misspellings that result from the different dyslexia types, conventional spell-checking applications are ineffectively adapted to recognize the variant misspellings that may result from persons with different types of dyslexia. Moreover, some properly spelled words are spelled identically to a dyslexia-related misspelling of another word. Such dyslexia-related misspellings are unrecognizable by conventional spell checking algorithms.
It would be advantageous to provide a spell-checking algorithm that recognizes dyslexia-related misspelled words. It would be further advantageous to provide a spell-checking algorithm that recognizes dyslexia-related misspelled words based on a dyslexia type. Moreover, it would be further advantageous to provide a spell-checking algorithm that recognizes words that, although correctly spelled, may be a dyslexia-related misspelling of another word.